The Grow package

Grow is a well-defined replacement for Makefiles and the like to build complex
hierarchies of files with minimal effort.
Like many Makefile-like tools, Grow depends on the notion of
timestamps to determine whether a file should be recompiled or
not. Grow is much simpler than those, though, and I might argue way
easier to use as well.
On startup, Grow will look for a file named Seed in the current
directory, and evaluate the grow expressions contained within.
For example, here is a simple Seed file to compile a single C file
into an executable.
tee $$arg:in
all = ($main:seq "All done !"):in $execs
execs = hook ld [main] [main.o] :in $objects
objects = hook cc [main.o] [main.c]
Notice the hook function ? It is the Grow primitive that calls an
external program to perform actual tasks.
In Grow, hooks are expected to only accept files as their arguments,
so we have to write the wrapper scripts cc and ld that accept
arguments in the form "destination... source...". They are pretty
trivial to write since they only involve renaming variables and
swapping arguments.
Here are sample cc and ld scripts to show you there is nothing
magical about them :
#!binbash
obj="$1" ; shift ; src="$1"
gcc -c "$src" -o "$obj"
#!binbash
bin="$1" ; shift ; obj="$1"
gcc "$obj" -o "$bin"
In grow, instead of writing recipes in the configuration, we just declare
hooks and then write the appropriate wrapper scripts to call compilers with
the correct flags and arguments.